Should I buy an established domain that has lost it's high PR due to being offline for several months?
-
I'm considering purchasing a domain that has sat idle for several months. It was a company's domain that they have owned since the mid1990's but they went out of business. Previously, it had a PR 5 but has since lost it's PR as it has sat 'inactive' with a 'server not found' warning for the past several months.
That being said, is there any point in buying the domain (for SEO purposes)? Is there any recourse with Google to try and re-establish the site's credibility or would I be starting over from scratch?
-
It is very helpful, thank you Don!
-
Hi Matt
I had a domain that I have used personally off an on for over 8 years now. At one time I had the site in maintenance mode for about a year and half. The day I turned the site to live, I started immediately getting orders. This was due to the strong backlink profile I have built.Customers were comin in from those links 2 weeks later we were back in Google SERP's.
Hope that helps in your decision.
Don
-
In my experience, having an aged domain is a big bonus for ranking. If you say that there are only less than 30 links to a brand name, you should be able to change the link profile rather easily. If you had hundreds of links to an unrelated text, that could change the way G perceives your website relevance and make it more difficult to rank for your terms.
However, I've also seen sites rank very well from having getting 301 redirects from popular, completely unrelated websites. I would expect your to see something similar to this benefit.
Other factors that may affect the value of domain: length of blank site, change in registrar, theme of last site
So will it help, yes. Worth the cost? Depends on the price. There is a lot of speculation in the domain registration/dropped domains value of SEO and nothing concrete from G, but based on my experience, buying an existing domain > starting from scratch.
-
Good idea Oleg. So I just ran it through OSE and every inbound link has the anchor text of the company name which is not what I would be optimizing the site for. That being said, the quality of the sites linking to the domain are excellent. Interestingly, that aren't a lot (less than 30) for a domain that had such high PR (5). They obviously did not devote any resources towards SEO but did at one point achieve a PR higher than any competitive sites I would go up against with this domain.
That being said, obviously it's not optimized for the keywords I would focus on and has also lost it's PR. Would it still be worthwhile to pursue? I guess when trying to answer that question, I'm wondering if the site's history (15+ years old) is enough to give me a leg up and jump start the SEO process enough to warrant the cost, whatever that might be.
Any thoughts there?
-
Does it still have links pointing to the site? I would do a link audit and see the quality of links pointing to the website (quality of backlinks, # of backlinks, anchor text). If they are links you would want to your new site, then it might be a worthwhile investment.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content that's behind CSS..
For content that's been loaded onto the page.. but it requires a click for it to be revealed.. as in a slider, or a tab, to save space or for a page's organization.. what are your thoughts on Google counting or weighting this content? It would make sense for Google to give it partial or no weighting as if Google attributes the content to being there, its confusion for the user to land on the page and have to find it/click around to find it.. Sorry if this is an obvious question to SEOs.. I've always assumed as long as it was loaded, it'd be mostly counted.. but I'm beginning to doubt my assumption. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedcommerce0 -
Lost SEO contract, new SEO wants us to do the following - can you explain why?
1. Make prokem.co.uk the master domain rather than prokem-corrosion-protection.com 2. Ensure each http URL is 301 redirected to its https counterpart via htaccess rather than in plesk 3. 301 redirect each www.prokem-corrosion-protection.com URL to its co.uk counterpart via htaccess. I can provide a list of pages to redirect as there are a number of duplicate pages that will need removing. It probably makes sense to implement these other changes at the same time: Remove all of the canonical tags currently on the site. Leverage browser caching by following Google’s page speed recommendations - https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/LeverageBrowserCaching Losslessly compress all of the website’s images. Combine and minify the website’s JavaScript
On-Page Optimization | | Simon_VO0 -
Thousands of 404's showing up from Wordpress Blog!?!?
Hey guys, Have recently seen thousands of 404 errors thrown up from my wordpress blog in Google Search Console. These are URL's trying to link (i'm not sure where from) to other parts of my site, but they are not relative to the site root... infact they are a mix of random folders/subfolders and pages on my site. E.g: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/st-martin-de-belleville/chalet-st-martin-de-belleville/ski-holidays/ski-holidays/summer/st-martin-de-belleville/summer/your-stay-st-martin-de-belleville.html This is a link to a picture on the blog: http://www.MYSITE.co.uk/blog/how-to/driving-to-the-alps/attachment/2013-land-rover-range-rover-evoque-front-snow-1/ And the rest of it is finding it's own way there! Any ideas? This is Wordpress by the way. Cheers, Paul. p.s. I got no help from the Wordpress community so am posting here! p.p.s I forgot to mention that MOZ is reporting these issues too, but running Screaming Frog does NOT show any 404's at all on my site...
On-Page Optimization | | SnowTrippin0 -
Can Robots.txt on Root Domain override a Robots.txt on a Sub Domain?
We currently have beta sites on sub-domains of our own domain. We have had issues where people forget to change the Robots.txt and these non-relevant beta sites get indexed by search engines (nightmare). We are going to move all of these beta sites to a new domain that we disallow all in the root of the domain. If we put fully configured Robots.txt on these sub-domains (that are ready to go live and open for crawling by the search engines) is there a way for the Robots.txt in the root domain to override the Robots.txt in these sub-domains? Apologies if this is unclear. I know we can handle this relatively easy by changing the Robots.txt in the sub-domain on going live but due to a few instances where people have forgotten I want to reduce the chance of human error! Cheers, Dave.
On-Page Optimization | | davelane.verve0 -
Duplicate content, which seems not to be duplicate :S
After crawling I am used to getting a lot of duplicate content messages in Moz, which are High Priority. I do not know what to do with them, since I believe we tackled all the issues. Main point being the advise to put in a link rel=canonical. An example of a page that accordeing to the report has a duplicate. I do not see how. Can you help with that? http://www.beat-it.nl/4y6hctr24x7wdmr-ml350-p-ic-procaresvc.html duplicate sample http://www.beat-it.nl/modu-hp-a5800-acm-for-64-256-aps.html
On-Page Optimization | | Raymo0 -
Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page
We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS. My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090 -
Different pages for OS's vs 1 Page with Dynamic Content (user agent), what's the right approach?
We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeLin0 -
Purchased domain
We purchased the existing domain www.LancasterPA.com two years ago to promote local businesses. While individual pages within the site are ranking well, we can't get the home page to rank at all in Google. Would there be anything in the history of the domain that could be standing in the way? Or, what else could we check? Our other regional websites are ranking really well. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | GordyH0